A group of motherboard enthusiasts working for GIGABYTE, sharing their insider knowledge and general ramblings of the motherboard business, the tech industry, latest technologies and trends, and other random odds and ends.

Wednesday, September 18, 2013

GIGABYTE “Pi is Returned” competition brings out insane records out of HWBOT community

What an incredible weekend of overclocking we just had. If there ever was a need for some professional shoutcasting that can run over the weekend, this was the right time as this competition had more twists and turns than a hundred German pretzels! For those of you unaware of the competition let me first introduce it for you.

HWBOT hosted the competition based on AMD A & FX series platforms with up to $5000 cash prizes from GIGABYE & AMD. The main benchmark was a system benchmark, SuperPi, which calculates Pi to 1 million and 32 million digits. I’ve just grabbed all the math nerd attentions in one sentence right?!? Overclocking is very number/stat intensive. The benchmark has been around for a long time and is an interesting and reasonable reliable way to tell the performance of platforms apart. There is an element of tweaking involved which requires platform/system tuning and some OS tuning. It needs liquid nitrogen not only on CPU but also memory as it directly affects efficiency (how fast you can complete calculation with same system parameters).

The stages had SuperPi 1M & 32M on both platforms with $500 top prize with a bonus $500 if the overclocker takes the platform world record. Did world records get taken, oh yes. Are all bonus cash prizes reached including bonus rounds, YES. It gets crazier, on some categories even 10th spot could have won the extra $500 cash prize as world records kept tumbling from day 1 literally!

The whole month during this competition saw overclocking upping the new record mark until The Stilt from Finland dropped a bombshell on the last day taking out all 4 categories. It looked impossible to beat but beaten it did get in FM2 categories by an impressive overclock from DFORDOG from China reaching an incredible 7869MHz 1M SuperPi on A10-6800K and GIGABYTE F2A85X-UP4 and Wizerty from France edging out The Stilt in SuperPi round by the merest of margins taking home $1K each for their effort.

The Stilt was unbeaten with the 990FXA-UD7 and FX9370 clocking at a monster 8160MHz 1M and 7876MHz 32M to take out $2K in prizes for those two scores with help of $500 bonus world records for each category win!